Outlaws

by Tim Green

  "You keep making it sound like Cody is some kind of monster, Madison. I'm telling you, he did nothing wrong."

  "Stop giving these people so much credit, Marty," she implored. "They play football. They hit people. They're paid to be nasty. And in a world where nastiness reigns king, Cody Grey is supposed to be one of the worst. You're probably lucky he didn't assault the guy. All the time you spend with him, you're probably lucky he hasn't wiped the floor with you yet."

  "Hey," Marty said, "really, you don't know Cody. First of all, he and I are friends. Hell, every time I see him he's running off to talk to this bunch of kids or that bunch of kids."

  "Yeah," Madison said skeptically, "but remember, I know how phony that game is. I watched Joe firsthand go out and talk about how much he did for kids. He couldn't stand the kids. It was all a big farce, just like the farce he's pulling right now to try and make my life miserable. But that's what football players do, isn't it? Make people miserable."

  Marty held up his hand to signal enough. He rarely cut Madison off, but in this case, he had to. She was wrong. She just didn't know what she was talking about. She was too poisoned because of her own horrible experience with a football player named Joe Thurwood. "Let's talk about something else," he said.

  "Let's."

  Dinner was fine, and they began to reminisce about their law school, slipping into that comfortable zone of old stories about old friends and then wondering where they are now. Marty loved to talk about life before Joe Thurwood. When they talked about those good old days, it was easy for Marty to realize why he would always think of Madison as she was back then, idealistic and unspoiled by the harsh realities of the world. No matter what had happened in the interim, to him Madison would always be the closest thing to perfection as a lawyer and as a woman.

  They stayed late. The dinner wine had been so good that they each ordered another and drank it slowly before considering dessert. It was eleven- thirty before they had their last cup of coffee, and Marty slipped his gold card underneath the check.

  The night had cooled enough for them to put the windows down on the way home. When they got onto the open road, Marty started to close both windows.

  "Let's leave them down, Marty," Madison said languorously.

  "I'll leave yours down," he said, continuing to close his own. "I don't like the wind."

  "Oh, come on, Marty," Madison said with a giggle she only displayed after several glasses of wine. "You don't have to worry about messing up your hair, do you? Why not live a little?"

  Marty's face turned to stone. Maybe it was the conversation with Jo-Jo and the talk about how rough and tough all football players are and how Cody Grey could wipe the floor with him. When it came to macho, tough-guy things, like fighting, it was as if he didn't even count. Or maybe it was because though he and Madison spent almost as much time together as a romantically involved couple would, he was still just good old Marty. Whatever it was, Marty was angry. Madison made it worse.

  "Oh, Marty," she said teasingly, "you don't get mad, do you? You don't get mad at me."

  He wasn't supposed to be tough enough to get mad! Marty pursed his lips and still said nothing.

  "Oooooo," Madison crowed, capping it off with another silly giggle.

  They sat in silence for the rest of the trip. Madison decided Marty had had a bad day, so she put her head back and enjoyed the cool night air rushing over her face and washing all other noise from her ears. When Marty slowed down to turn into Madison's development, he realized she had fallen asleep. He pulled up into the driveway and shut off his engine as she opened her eyes.

  Marty walked Madison up to the door, even though he was still mad. He stepped inside to say good night. She turned to face him with her warm smile and gave him a friendly hug.

  "Thank you, Marty," she said. "I really enjoyed dinner. I don't know, tonight was just one of those nights I needed to get out. I didn't mean anything. Don't be mad...."

  Marty let out a heavy sigh, and with it, any ill feelings he had. Madison was his friend. He should lighten up.

  "I'm not," he said. "Just a long day, I guess. See you tomorrow?"

  Madison nodded. Marty gave her a kiss on the cheek and said good-bye before turning out into the night.

  Madison stood there for a long while, then she went inside. She suddenly felt completely alone. She wished more than anything that her father was there. Even though she knew her feelings were largely due to all the wine she had drunk, she still wanted him to hold her. He was the only one she could think of who could make her feel better. She wished that wasn't so. It wasn't right that a thirty-five-year-old woman didn't have a man in her life who could hold her besides her father. A single tear rolled down her cheek and onto the front of her beautiful new dress. She sat down on the bottom of the staircase and wrapped her arms around the newel post to sob. Abby came padding in half-asleep from the laundry room and nuzzled Madison until she held the dog tightly.

  After a good cry, Madison kissed Abby's head and went upstairs to her room. She heard Abby's nails clicking along the marble floor on her way back to her bed. Madison activated the alarm from her bedroom and got into a hot shower.

  As the hot water cascaded over her she thought about why she couldn't be romantic with Marty. It basically came down to sex, or sexual attraction anyway. It just wasn't there. Madison knew she could never be happy with a man who didn't get her excited in a physical way as well as an intellectual and emotional way. She knew from her failed marriage with Joe that the physical element could certainly not carry a relationship. But she also knew for a fact that the other connections without the physical attraction would be just as much of a life sentence. If Madison couldn't have a man she wanted to take to her bed every night, she would have no man at all. Madison climbed out of the shower and went to sleep alone.

  Joe Thurwood took one last drag on his joint before stubbing it out and swallowing the roach. A smile crept across his face when he saw Marty's beanpole figure come ambling away from the house. He didn't want that prick fucking with his wife. It was bad enough that the two of them gallivanted around town like a couple of fools. It made him look bad, real fucking bad. He had plans for Marty, though. That much he had promised himself. He wasn't planning on being around forever. This town was too small for him, and 10c many people knew him. He had made some contacts in New Orleans. He had a new identity and a job waiting for him in a big-time organization. Eventually he would get his own piece of the action, and that is what he wanted. That is what he deserved. But he wasn't going to show up empty-handed.

  First, he was going to put his wife through some serious hell. He was going to make her sorry for what she'd done to him. Second, he was going to squeeze her for every last dollar he could get and then disappear. He'd drive into New Orleans behind the wheel of a Mercedes and set himself up in a nice flat in the French Quarter with the money he got. It would be better to start his new life that way. People would respect him more.

  Before he blew town, though, he was going to pay his old agent back for trying to fuck around with his wife. He was going to pay him a visit with a baseball bat and some pliers and leave him with a few mementos of pain that he would never forget. This promise to himself was the only way he had been able not to lose control thus far. It took incredible willpower not to leave Cahn in a bloody heap the first night he saw the two of them kissing at the river.

  Joe took a baggy out of his pants and stuck his nose inside, snorting up the last of the blow that was trapped in the comer. The grass made him sluggish, and he needed a little lift. Joe got out of his Blazer and crossed the street. He looked around furtively. Except for the crickets chirring in the balmy night, the neighborhood was quiet. It almost always was. The lots were big enough, and the foliage grew around the homes like a jungle, so he could creep around his house without much concern that someone would call the cops. Of course he always dressed in dark clothes to make it less likely that any meddlers would see him in the first place. If
anyone did see him, he had an excuse ready for them. He thought it would make him look good anyway. He would say that he was only trying to get a glimpse of his son. The boy that had been taken from him by the miserable bitch mother, the slick lawyer.

  The thought of Maddy gave Joe a charge of adrenaline and then, peering into the windows from the darkness of the shrubbery, he saw her standing in the foyer. She wore a dress that left no doubt she still had the same sensational body she had the first time he fucked her. Joe felt himself beginning to stiffen as his memory and imagination kicked into gear simultaneously. The blood rushed to his groin. With the blow and the adrenaline and the memories, it was all he could do to keep himself from smashing through the glass and fucking her right there on the marble floor. She needed it, he could see. She was crying,- he imagined it was because she needed to be fucked so badly.

  When Maddy sat down on the stairs and bent over, he could see down the front of her dress. In a trance Joe stared at the luscious curves of her beautiful breasts. He knew exactly what they felt like, and he could feel them now. He undid his pants and let them fall to his knees. In his mind he could actually hear her moans of passion, the ones she used to make in the darkness of their bedroom when he would awake late at night and take her in her sleep, fucking her hard in every imaginable way he could think of. In the safety of the darkness, he stood there, hunched over and stroking himself into a frenzy until he felt the mind-bending release he had felt with her time and time again. He choked himself hard, shuddering until his knees felt weak. He actually staggered before he pulled his pants up and backed away through the bushes with the stealth of a reptile.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Some days were just worse than others. That was always the way
  The knee was not only aching as though someone had wedged a rusty nail between the two bones, it was swollen. It happened like that. The night before it had been sore, but no more than usual after a week of practice. Now it was the size of a grapefruit. Not a good sign. It wasn't a matter of him dealing with pain, or numbing the pain, or ignoring the pain. All those things he could do. The question now was whether or not he could use the joint. It was like a frozen wing flap on an airplane,- if it didn't go down, you just couldn't fly. Cody took a hot shower, hoping his knee would loosen up. It didn't. He hobbled down to one of the hotel's banquet rooms where the team's pregame meal was being served.

  He tried to hide his predicament from his teammates as he stood in line for some eggs and pancakes. No one really noticed. They were used to his bum knee by now, and like most people, football players gradually became desensitized to someone else's chronic pain. Besides, everyone was too jittery to notice. Today was the first game of the season, and most guys hadn't slept well in the hotel, making everyone twice as introverted and grumpy as normal. Every player knew that most of them would have been better off at home with their wives or girlfriends, but that was just the way the Outlaws did it. Like on most NFL teams, anyone who was going to play Sunday had to spend the previous night at some cheesy hotel on the outskirts of town, where the team had been given a reduced rate as a draw for groupies and overzealous fans. It was someone's notion of a battle camp, and like dog crap on the bottom of a shoe, it had stuck.

  Cody sat down at an empty table and tried to make himself eat. He would need the energy. The eggs looked like yellow Styrofoam and had about the same taste. The pancakes were heavy and reminiscent of plaster of Paris. He tried to overwhelm the stale flavor with syrup, but it was too sweet and already cold. When he popped open the top of the stainless-steel syrup container with his thumb to see if some prankster had dumped a packet of sugar in it, a fly buzzed out and droned heavily toward the ceiling. After a few more mouthfuls of the eggs, Cody got up and gimped out. The fly and the pain in his knee were making it hard for him to keep the food in his stomach. He was better off trying to hold on to what he had than risk the whole thing ending up in the bowl. Cody got into his truck and headed downtown toward the stadium.

  Although it was still three solid hours until the noon kickoff, there was already a healthy contingent of maniacs outside the players' fenced-in parking lot. One old Chevy pickup truck was filled with rednecks sitting on a bed of hay, tossing down Busch beer. They cheered wildly for Cody when he got out of his truck. Cody set his game face and walked past the unruly crew without a word. His reticence made the rednecks hoot and holler even more. There was nothing they loved more than a bad-assed football player.

  One scrawny, shirtless man with a grizzly beard and leather Confederate soldier's cap stood up in the back of the truck, hoisting a can and screaming, "Cody Grey, you're so damn mean, you hate your own mamma. An' we love the hell out of ya! Woooooooo!"

  The others cheered with him. Cody shook his head. Everybody loves a good bad-man.

  Once inside the stadium, Cody found that only a few veteran players had gotten there before him. They were the really old guys, in their mid-thirties, who had acquired idiosyncrasies over the course of their careers. These older players had a ritualized pregame procedure, so they had to get to the stadium hours before kickoff in order to accomplish their superstitious routine. Normally, the longer a player was in the league, the longer his routine became. Cody's routine included sit-ups and push-ups, the number and sequence depending on how he had played the previous week. If he'd had a good game, or the team won, he'd likely repeat the sequence. He'd also lay out his entire uniform, including all its padding, on the floor. Then, with just a towel around his waist, he'd tape his wrists and forearms and get the trainers to tape his ankles. Then he'd return to his seat and begin to dress from either the top down or the bottom up, depending again on how successful the previous week's order had been. Once Cody had tried to dress from the middle out, but he broke his hand that game. Of course, he never tried that again.

  Today, though, Cody didn't have the luxury to perform with his routine. Today he went straight to the training room and looked for Dr. Cort. He needed more than drugs for his knee right now. Cort was having a coffee with Dr. Burlitz and Jerry in Jeny's office. They were saying something about someone's congenital heart defect when he walked in.

  "Cody," Cort said in his easy and friendly manner, "how's that knee?"

  Cody gave him a weak smile and said, "Not too good."

  Cort set his coffee cup down with the same deliberate motion that Cody suspected he used to set aside a bloody scalpel.

  "Let's take a look at it," Cort said cheerfully, like they were all going to get to see the newest butterfly he'd added to his collection.

  Cody didn't like having the entire medical staff hovering around him, but they were like that. They sensed that something gruesome was about to take place, and they were no different from all those people who stop traffic to gawk at a bloody car accident.

  Amid five trainers and the two doctors, Cody watched as Cort punched a needle the size of a cocktail straw into the side of his puffy knee. Cody winced, and everyone but Burlitz looked away as Cort wiggled and pushed the horse needle, placing it just so under the bony cap of Cody's knee. When it was just the way he wanted it, Cort pulled out on the plunger, and the fat syringe began to fill with a yellow fluid that soon swirled with dark red clouds of blood. Cody had to watch it, despite the excruciating pain. It was his blood and fluid that were being drained, and if he wasn't going to keep an eye on things, then who the hell else would?

  The plunger was almost all the way out, and it still pulled merry swirls of blood into the syringe.

  "Gotta go in again," Cort sai
d matter-of-factly, setting aside the big needle like some bloated mosquito and picking up another empty one for its feeding. Cody noticed a couple of his teammates had entered the training room and were warily eyeing the whole procedure from the far side of the room. They knew better than to get close. That was bad luck.

  The second one was as painful as the first, but after the plunger was only halfway home, the knee just had no more fluid to give. Cort fished around a little,- then, well satisfied, he removed the second monster needle and picked up a harmless-looking dart-sized syringe that was filled with a clear cortizone- Xylocaine concoction: high-octane. The thin needle was like a pinprick after the big boys,- and besides, Cody knew that it spelled relief. There were three in all. Cort shot them into his knee from different angles. By the time the third one went in, the first was already starting to make his knee feel like it was falling asleep. Cort finished and patted Cody's leg.

  "Lie there a minute and we'll see how it feels," the doctor said.

  Cody lay back as he was told. The crowd dispersed. The fun was over. Cody had time now to smell the sickening aroma of the alcohol they'd bathed his knee in and to see the bloody gauze pads that lay in clumps beside the host of needles lined in a row like spent soldiers.

  Cort came back in a few minutes and started flexing Cody's bad knee. He felt a little of the tugging, but the joint itself was not painful. It seemed to flex smoothly, like the perfect knee of a teenage long-distance runner.

  "Okay?" Cort asked.

  "Okay," Cody said, sitting up and taking hold of the deadened joint in both his hands to flex it as the doctor had done.

  Cort smiled, gave his calf a pat, and walked away. Cody was still flexing the incredibly smooth knee when Paul Dryer, the team's forty-year-old head coach, walked into the locker room in his houndstooth jacket, cowboy boots, and tie.